Annotated Bibliography

Moulthrop, Stuart. "The Shadow of an Informand : An Experiment in Hypertext Rhetoric." November, 1994. http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/Moulthrop/hypertexts/hoptext/A_Beginning07084.html (28 Feb 2000)

• Summary and Review

The Shadow of an Informand is a piece of hypertext on hypertext.

Moulthrop experiments with the hypertext form for this article. In it, he expresses interest, excitement, anticipation and skepticism with this new medium. Questions pertaining to the future of the written word and hypertexts are posed and issues discussed. Moulthrop appears to be absolutely certain at times and totally clueless at other moments.

In a hypertext piece, Moulthrop’s wide-ranging emotions and states of mind are easily, swiftly and effectively conveyed without rendering the work incoherent or reducing it to a fragmented, haphazard mess because of the very nature of the hypertext document which comprises the essential element, the hyperlink. Depending on which links you follow, you might not encounter Moulthrop the uninitiated, but rather, the Moulthrop, well-versed and competent in this particular field and therein lies the beauty of the hyperlink. The hyperlink allows Moulthrop, the writer, to present to you implicitly the concept of a hypertext instead of explicitly defining it in written form and at the same time, it establishes choices for you, the reader and lets you choose the way to start and end the article. 

However, as such, attempting to compose a summary for the Shadow of an Informand is both a futile and unproductive project because the Shadow is (as with hypertexts) non-/multi-sequential, non-linear, has no center. Therefore, one cannot read it as one would a non-hypertext document where at the end of the reading, a summary or a conclusion which would correspond to most other readings of it is possible.

Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that one can generate many summaries1 from the Shadow of an Informand  than to say that a summary of it is impossible. And this is what Moulthrop is probably aiming for in this experiment with writing in the hypertextual medium.

Because of the hypertext nature of the article, Moulthrop relies heavily and extensively on the use of hyperlinks (there are 440 of them) and this article aptly highlights the importance of hyperlinks to hypertexts.